He’s referring to the vowel sounds emanating from the audio recorder on his desk.

By “romance,” he means the Romance languages derived from Latin, including Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, French and Romanian.

“Toe,” says the voice, the “O” sound ringing out pure and clear, like the “O” in “espresso,” in “allegro,” in “basso profondo.” It’s a vowel sound that would be right at home in the land of Michelangelo and Vivaldi; of Virgil and Sophia Loren.

But the speaker is a born-and-bred anglophone from Montreal.

Boberg is a sociolinguist at McGill University who studies the way Montrealers speak English. Not just the fact that we go to the “dep” instead of the convenience store; that we eat our pizza “all-dressed” (with pepperoni, mushrooms, green peppers and cheese); that we live in a “four-and-a-half” (two-bedroom apartment) with a “gallery” (porch); that we “open” and “close” the lights and pepper our speech with French terms like “planification,” “formation” and “animator.”

There’s another thing that sets Montreal English apart, something you can hear any time you stroll along Ste. Catherine St. It’s our accent – or rather, accents.

Unlike most North American cities, Boberg says, Montreal is not a linguistic melting pot where everyone ends up sounding more or less the same.

Montreal English comes in different flavours, depending on whether our forebears hailed from Lodz, Naples or County Down; whether we grew up in the East End or the West Island; whether we hung out with kids from our own culture or went to a school that was ethnically diverse.

Brenda Fayerman, IT director at JPPS-Bialik, a private Jewish day school, says that when she visits Toronto, her accent immediately sets her apart as a Montrealer. “I think I have a Jewish intonation and I use very Jewish expressions,” says Fayerman, who grew up in Côte des Neiges and lives in Côte St. Luc.

The Italian Montreal accent is a defining trait of a community that bridges the city’s French-English divide, says Domenic Cusmano, the publisher of Accenti, a Montreal-based cultural magazine for the Canadian-Italian community.

“In Toronto, Italians are pretty much absorbed in the culture,” Cusmano says. “There is not really a Toronto Italian accent in the way there is one in Montreal.”

Many Montreal Italians are linguistic acrobats, swinging effortlessly between three languages. “My nonna will talk to me in Italian and my grandfather on my mom’s side will talk to me in French, so I have all three,” says Robyn Orsini, 15, a Secondary 4 student at Laurier Macdonald High School in St. Léonard who feels most comfortable in English. Robyn also studies Spanish in the school’s international baccalaureate program.

Boberg was immediately struck by the diversity of Montreal English when he came to McGill in 1997 from Philadelphia. He chose to compare the speech of Italian, Jewish and British Montrealers because they were the largest groups in the anglophone community and their accents presented some interesting contrasts.

The 2006 Census lists 2.4 million francophones, 448,325 anglophones and 783,210 allophones in greater Montreal. The 260,350 Italian Montrealers are the largest ethnic group after people who list their heritage as Canadian, French or British. Jewish Montrealers number about 90,000.

A native of Northfield, Minn., who grew up in Edmonton, Boberg completed his PhD at the University of Pennsylvania under the famous sociolinguist William Labov, with whom Boberg co-authored the Atlas of North American English in 2006. Boberg has also written a forthcoming book on Canadian English.

Born to a Canadian father and an Oxford-educated mother who lived in South Africa as a child, Boberg, 45, developed an early interest in spoken English. “My mother spoke British English, my father spoke Canadian English and we lived in the U.S. That loosened up my ears,” he says.

So distinctive are the different varieties of Montreal English that Boberg calls them ethnolects – dialects spoken by particular cultural groups.

Many Jewish Montrealers pronounce the hard “g” sound in “bang,” “wrong,” “hanger” and “singer” and sprinkle their sentences with Yiddish words like mazel tov (congratulations) or fapitzed (gussied up).

Many Italian Montrealers emphasize the final consonant in words like “skirt” or “joke” and say things like: “When are they going to clean the snow” (instead of “clear the snow”) and “Me, I like chocolate” (instead of “I like chocolate”).

Of the three groups, British-origin Montrealers most resemble English Canadians outside Quebec in their speech. But a few traits distinguish them from other Canadians. One is the “ar” sound in marry, which most Montrealers pronounce differently from the “ar” sound in Mary. In the rest of Canada, Barry rhymes with “berry” and the first syllable in “carrot” sounds like “care,” but the two sounds are distinct here.

Boberg recently completed a study that confirmed his hypothesis that Montreal-born anglophones of British, Jewish and Italian heritage have measurably different accents.

Under Boberg’s supervision, linguistics students recorded interviews with 93 subjects. The vowel sounds of the three groups were then compared using acoustic analysis.

Of the three groups, Italian Montrealers articulated vowels most clearly while people of British ancestry opened their mouths the least.

Jewish Montrealers tended to pronounce the “I” in words like “sigh” so it sounds like “soy.”

Newlyweds Dan Quinn and Silvana Barone often laugh about the differences in how they speak English. Barone, a medical student at Université de Montréal, is of Italian heritage and grew up Villeray and St. Leonard while Quinn, a teacher at St.Thomas High School, is a West Islander of Irish ancestry.

“I’ll say something and he’ll say, ‘Oh well, it’s because you’re Italian.’ ” says Barone. “That’ll happen all the time. It can be little expressions, or sometimes I’ll say something in a grammatically incorrect way and he will correct me. He’ll notice a lot of things that I wouldn’t necessarily notice when I’m hanging out with my Italian friends.”

Boberg denies that his study promotes stereotypes about the communities under study.

“In linguistics, we’re interested in how membership in groups affects the way people talk. But we always speak in terms of attributes that belong to groups, not to individuals.

“Any person is a unique individual and may be more or less characteristic of the group that they may identify with. But the fact that there’s also individual variation does not prevent these group-level differences from emerging and from being of interest to linguistic science,” he says.

Distinctive speech patterns are common among immigrant communities everywhere, Boberg says. What makes Montreal unusual is that these differences persist well into the third generation and beyond.

In 2006, 66 per cent of the 3.6 million Montreal-area residents spoke French as their mother tongue, 12.5 per cent English and 22 per cent another language.

On the island of Montreal, francophones accounted for just under half of the 1.8 million residents, anglophones for 18 per cent and allophones for 33 per cent.

The dominance of French is a matter of policy as well as population. Quebec’s language laws, which impose French in advertising, the workplace and much of the education system, mean that immigrants are not exposed to the pervasive presence of English as in other North American cities.

But English Montrealers’ minority status doesn’t tell the whole story. The geographic distribution of the English-speaking population also contributes to the diversity of Montreal accents.

Montrealers have a long tradition of clustering in ethnic enclaves: Think of the Jewish neighbourhood around the Main in the novels of Mordecai Richler. As cultural communities have prospered and moved farther away from the downtown core, they have continued to congregate in certain neighbourhoods. For example, says Boberg, more than half the residents of Hampstead and Côte St. Luc are Jewish – a majority that rises to 83 per cent in the census tract southwest of Cavendish Mall.

Italian-Canadians are the largest ethnic group in St. Léonard and Rivière des Prairies, representing about one-third of the population, and as much as 67 per cent of the population in some census tracts.

“In Edmonton, a Jewish or Italian kid would be completely surrounded by models that would help them assimilate,” Boberg says.

“In Montreal, you get lots of Italian kids who go to a school where most of their friends are Italian. You get Jewish kids who go to school where most of the kids are Jewish.”

In recent years, many cultural communities have relocated to Laval, the South Shore and the West Island. The future of Montreal accents depends on whether those groups remain intact or gradually become assimilated, says Boberg. “When you begin to get people breaking away from the ethnic groups to which they’ve belonged, and marrying outside their own ethnic group, the children of those marriages will tend to speak blended varieties.”

The future of Quebec’s language debate is another factor. “It’s hard to know how English is going to work in a community where there are so many political complexities that surround the use of the language,” Boberg says.

Argyro Saitanis, 52, a Town of Mount Royal mother of three, treasures the way ethnic communities retain their distinctiveness. “Montreal is so obviously different from the rest of the world,” she says. “All these ethnic groups living side-by-side and communicating in two languages and sometimes three.”

Robert Piazza, a high school English teacher who recently moved to Edmonton, misses the city’s varied accents.

“Depending on what part of town you’re in, whether it’s N.D.G. or Rivière des Prairies, there’s a different accent. Coming back to Montreal over the holidays, I realized that not only do you see different cultures but you hear them as well.”

Piazza, 29, recalled an inspiration that once struck him while visiting New York of capturing a sonic snapshot of the city by walking around with a tape recorder.

“You could do that in Montreal also, he says. “You would have this mosaic of accents and dialects that would be Montreal. So if you’re feeling homesick, you could push the play button and you’d be back home.”

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